Frank's Story

Frank Shorter is the father of the modern running boom. An enduringly popular speaker, he spins a captivating narrative about winning the 1972 Olympic Marathon. The story he hasn't told is the dark truth about his own father.

Today, more than 50 years later, the memory still staggers Frank Shorter. He rises from his kitchen table and moves to the window, staring out at the Flatirons standing sentinel over Boulder, Colorado, his home of nearly 40 years. Blinding January sunshine shatters off Wonderland Lake, and a steady stream of runners works the trail around it. Spotting Shorter in the window, one runner waves to him excitedly. A storm is forecast for later, but at midmorning the sky is cerulean above the Rocky Mountain snow peaks.

"I can imagine what a wonderful picture we made," Shorter says, turning back to the table.

His tousled hair is mostly gray now, but just as thick as in the iconic photos of him from the 1970s. "Everybody in Middletown loved my father. They probably thought I was the luckiest little boy in the world to be able to tag along with him." Another pause. "But those house calls were like all the other times I spent around him. I was terrified. I was on red-alert every minute. You never could tell what was going to set him off. A lot of times, it didn't take anything." Shorter's voice thickens. He speaks with a Yale man's precision, avoiding profanity and cliche.

"He wasn't going to hit me in the car. He'd wait until later, at home, where no one could see him." A heavy silence descends. As the ghost of Dr. Samuel Shorter rises, Frank's eyes fill. He begins to tell a story of his father, then stops. He starts again, and stops once more.

He can tell you the exact date of his first significant running injury—February 19, 1976, a hairline fracture in his foot at an indoor meet here in Boulder at the University of Colorado—but he struggles to conjure fragmentary memories of his traumatic early family life; a life that, until now, he has never fully revealed. The silence between these pauses seems all the more wrenching because, normally, the stories flow out of Shorter: the story of his Olympic gold-medal run in '72, which is generally regarded as the precipitating event of the modern running movement; of his silver-medal marathon performance at the '76 Games in Montreal, where Waldemar Cierpinski, an East German who was later documented to be part of that nation's doping system, beat Shorter out for the gold; of Shorter being the last person to see Steve Prefontaine alive on the night of his fatal car crash in May 1975; and of Shorter's seminal work as the first chairman of the board of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency.

Shorter fluently recounts these stories and others, weaving them into a narrative that he delivers to audiences around the nation in his enduring role as the father of the running boom. "Frank's contributions crossed over—they affected the whole culture," says the novelist John L. Parker, the author of Once a Runner and Shorter's roommate and training partner during their days with the Florida Track Club in Gainesville during the 1970s. "Alongside figures like Prefontaine, Bill Rodgers, and Roger Bannister, Shorter was the quintessential runner." But the story that Shorter only recently has come to acknowledge as the genesis for all others emerges in agonized fits and starts. He tried to tell it before, first in 1991. He'd been invited to a race in Florida that was benefiting a center for abused children. He mentioned to a reporter from the Fort Lauderdale Sun Sentinel that the cause was dear to him because his father had abused him as a child. The reporter wrote an article based on that claim, and The New York Times later ran a brief item. But Shorter didn't go into detail about the abuse, his father denied any wrongdoing, and the story soon died. "There was less awareness of child abuse in that era, and more willingness to deny the extent of the problem, especially when it involved a successful man like my father," Shorter says. "Also, my father was still alive, and I was still afraid of him."

Another reason Shorter refrained from elaborating at the time had to do with his deeply ingrained stoicism and an instinct for understatement. He had long been known, even by his peers, as a bit of a loner and as someone willing to stand apart from the pack. Back in 1972 at the Munich Olympics, Shorter had watched the swimmer Mark Spitz rack up an unprecedented seven gold medals. With each race that he won, the number of handlers and marketers around Spitz grew. Shorter didn't begrudge Spitz his self-promotion; like all Olympians in that rigidly amateur era, Spitz had toiled for years without making a dime, and was only seeking to leverage his moment.

But on the day of the Olympic Marathon, as he waited to run, Shorter resolved that if and when his moment came, he'd handle it differently—no entourage, no image, not even an agent. His moment soon arrived. "I threw a 4:33 surge between miles nine and 10, and from that point on I was out of sight of the guys trailing me—Mamo Wolde [of Ethiopia], Derek Clayton [of Australia], and Kenny [Moore of the United States]," Shorter says, recalling the Munich marathon. "The whole second half, I kept hitting my pace. I had the talent to go out fast, by myself, and ride the pain. I learned that from watching Clayton and Ron Clarke, but it was also something I internalized from my childhood."

Shorter's masterful gold-medal performance, run in a time of 2:12:19, made him a household name across America, and soon thousands of his previously sedentary countrymen were taking to the roads, running in his footsteps. In the years since, in all his various roles, Shorter has upheld his resolution, operating with consistent integrity and good taste. As a track and road-race commentator for network TV, for instance, he avoided sensationalism in favor of thoughtful analysis. During U.S. distance runners' battle to gain professional status in the 1970s, Shorter rejected confrontation, capitalizing on his relationship with the sport's leaders to broker a compromise in which athletes' prize-winnings were placed in trust. During his tenure as the first head of USADA, Shorter de-emphasized outing individual dopers in favor of building an overall system of deterrence. In his present public-speaking career, he employs no agency to arrange his appearances—"People are amazed when they call me and I pick up the phone myself," he says—and prefers to stay in the homes of local runners when he travels to events rather than in hotels.

In his reluctance to build a brand, paradoxically, Shorter has done just that. Combining his Olympic fame with a bachelor's degree from Yale and a law degree from the University of Florida, he has established a reputation for dignity and decorum that resembles the status that Joe DiMaggio achieved in his postbaseball career. "Working with Frank sort of ruined me for working with other professional athletes," says Steve Bosley, the founder of the Bolder Boulder 10-K, the nation's second largest road race, whose course features a statue of Shorter. "I would compare their style to the way that Frank does business, and I was always disappointed." Accordingly, Shorter has avoided jumping on any bandwagon—including that of abuse victim. "To fuse my identity with what has become a trendy syndrome, to get lumped in with the confessions of fading rock stars and politicians looking to boost their careers, is against everything I stand for," he says.

And yet, here he is on this winter morning, 63 years old, renowned and respected, with three happy adult children of his own and his first grandchild on the way, with the runners who are his heirs flowing past his sun-filled house on the edge of the Rocky Mountains, suffering to recall the crimes his father committed more than a half-century ago. Recent, pivotal events, Shorter explains, have prompted him to speak out.